Adjusting/making saturation

[mnordbye]

I basically want to know how saturation is formed. Are there specific frequencies which to adjust for saturation?

Magnus N

[John Lyons]

We might need more details here.
"Saturation" can mean different things here in pedal land.

Are you talking about overdrive, compression, hard clipping, etc etc?

Technically saturation is when something will not accept any more of something else.
A sponge saturated with water. A guitar signal saturated with clipping...

John

[mnordbye]

Sorry for the vague description. What i meant by saturation is the feel/sound you get when palm muting, typical in very high gain pedals. It may not be correct to say saturation, but that was the best i came up with with my not-so-perfect english speaking. 

Anyway, any frequencies related to that "feel", or is it just to put in a hell of a lot of distortion?

Magnus N

[Meanderthal]

 Ya wanna make sure you don't have too much bottom end(I'm serious, less is more for this purpose!), midrange notch optional, good high gain, and diode clipping.

[John Lyons]

Do you mean the sound of the bass note overtones when you palm mute?
Or are you thinking of the crunch sound?
Dr boogie is a good one for that.

John

[brett]

Hi
the first things I thought of were compression by valves (e.g. by 12AX7s) and output transformers.  The high-gain amp emulators (Boogie, BSIAB etc) are made to get this sound. 

From the perspective of a real amp, starting with low wattage helps.  The little "Deacy" amp and the 9V Pignose have tightly compressed sounds (and the 18 watter is a more serious amp with lots of very tasty crunch).  A simple way to achieve the sound of a saturated transformer would be to drive a small coupling transformer with a large signal.  Unfortunately, nobody seems to have produced a pedal project like this (but I'm thinking about it).

cheers

[petemoore]

  Core saturation occurs in output transformers, the sound is abruptly disturbing 'GONK" so I usnerstand, making the connotations for using it as a descriptive term for sound type less appealing.
  I used to call 'it' saturation, 'it' being hard clipping, perhaps via double clipping, certainly heavily boosted swing voltages cutoff hard by set or more of diodes, amp/diode or amp/diode x2, boost amp diode...combos like that which 'pin' the signal levels to the diode thresholds and 'twitch' replaces 'dynamic range' on attacks, sustain is generally full on then noise creeps in...and 'saturation' kind of fits, rich harmonic content and clipping distortion which keeps the compression and grit levels very high no matter how small the input, pick attacks become more of a 'k' or 'ch' pronunciation sound, very little increase in volume, more of increased complexity of mid/hi frequencies while getting squashed.